The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for regulating the influencing of articles which constitute, form part of or contain or include smokers' products, especially for regulating the timing of influencing of plain or filter-tipped cigarettes, cigars, cigarillos, filter rod sections or packs for smokers' products in machines for the making and/or processing of such types of articles.
Cigarettes, cigarette packs, filter plugs or other articles which form part of, constitute or contain smokers' products are normally conveyed along a predetermined path during transport in or through a making and/or processing machine. Successive articles or selected articles of a long or continuous series of such articles must be acted upon by one or more article influencing means (e.g., ejector nozzles for defective articles, perforating means for the wrappers of successive articles, shifting means for some or all of the articles, inverting means for selected articles, decelerating or accelerating means for selected or successive articles, and/or others) which are adjacent to the path of movement of articles and are responsive to control signals which are generated by detectors or the like. The timing of actuation of such influencing means is important, especially in a high-speed maker and/or processing machine which turns out and/or processes extremely large quantities of articles per unit of time. For example, a modern cigarette maker is designed to turn out up to and even in excess of one hundred cigarettes per second. Therefore, the interval of advancement of an article past an article influencing means (e.g., an ejector nozzle for defective articles) is very short, namely, in the range of a few milliseconds. As a rule, only a fraction of each such interval is available for actual influencing of an article so that the timing of the start and termination of each influencing action is of utmost importance. For example, if the length of each aforementioned interval is ten milliseconds, the duration of an influencing action must be less than ten milliseconds. If the influencing action is started too soon, it can be applied to the wrong (preceding) article. On the other hand, if the start of the influencing action is too late, such action can be felt by the article following that article which is to be influenced by a jet of compressed fluid or the like.